Dining briefs: Beard dinner, Joly wins, Cantu does beer

Lagunitas Taproom will open to the public on June 25.

Kevin PangTribune reporter

All-star collaboration: Last year, the James Beard Foundation took its act on the road with a pop-up culinary series called "Taste America." For this year’s stop in Chicago, the chefs involved are a veritable all-star team. The event will be held at the Trump International Hotel on Friday, Oct. 17 and headlined with a four-course dinner by Alinea’s Grant Achatz, Sixteen’s Thomas Lents and renowned Charleston/Nashville chef Sean Brock. Their opening act, so to say, will feature small bites from five Beard Award winners: Next’s Dave Beran and The Purple Pig’s Jimmy Bannos Jr. (both winners in 2014), Naha’s Carrie Nahabedian, Hot Chocolate’s Mindy Segal and Slurping Turtle’s Takashi Yagihashi. Tickets for this event are $400. If you can’t afford that, Grant Achatz will be doing a free cooking demonstration the next morning, 10:30 a.m. at Sur La Table at 900 N. Michigan Ave.

Winner: The United States Bartenders' Guild holds an annual competition that crowns a U.S. bartender of the year. Fifteen finalists competed Monday and Tuesday, and the winner selected is The Aviary's Charles Joly, who will now represent the U.S. at the global finals in Scotland next month.

Cantu does beer: My colleague Josh Noel delivers some big news from the beer front: The latest player in Chicago’s craft beer game is Homaro Cantu. The Moto chef has signed a lease on a 7,000-square-foot space on the Northwest Side, which he plans to turn into an organic brewery. The facility will also house Cantu’s next food concept, what Noel describes as "low-key Mexican ... inspired by Cantu’s grandmother’s cooking."

Finally: Noel also pays a visit to the Lagunitas' long-gestating Chicago taproom, which will open to the public officially next Wednesday, July 25.